(Very preliminary)A tribute to the vision and legacy of Israel Gelfand, the invited papers in this volume reflect the unity of mathematics as a whole, with particular emphasis on the many connections among the fields of geometry, physics, and representation theory. Written by leading mathematicians, the text is broadly divided into two sections: the first is devoted to developments at the intersection of geometry and physics, and the second to representation theory and algebraic geometry. Topics include conformal field theory, K-theory, noncommutative geometry, gauge theory, representations of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras, and various aspects of the Langlands program. Graduate students and researchers will benefit from and find inspiration in this broad and unique work, which brings together fundamental results in a number of disciplines and highlights the rewards of an interdisciplinary approach to mathematics and physics.Contributors: M. Atiyah, A. Beilinson, J. Bernstein, A. Connes, P. Deligne, R. Dijkgraaf, D. Gaitsgory, M. Gromov, F. Hirzebruch, M. Hopkins, D. Kazhdan, F. Kirwan, M. Kontsevich, B. Kostant, G. Lusztig, D. McDuff, H. Nakajima, S. Novikov, P. Sarnak, A.

The text is based on an established graduate course given at MIT that provides an introduction to the theory of the dynamical Yang-Baxter equation and its applications, which is an important area in representation theory and quantum groups. The book, which contains many detailed proofs and explicit calculations, will be accessible to graduate students of mathematics, who are familiar with the basics of representation theory of semi-simple Lie algebras.

Is there a vector space whose dimension is the golden ratio? Of course not-the golden ratio is not an integer! But this can happen for generalizations of vector spaces-objects of a tensor category. The theory of tensor categories is a relatively new field of mathematics that generalizes the theory of group representations. It has deep connections with many other fields, including representation theory, Hopf algebras, operator algebras, low-dimensional topology (in particular, knot theory), homotopy theory, quantum mechanics and field theory, quantum computation, theory of motives, etc. This book gives a systematic introduction to this theory and a review of its applications. While giving a detailed overview of general tensor categories, it focuses especially on the theory of finite tensor categories and fusion categories (in particular, braided and modular ones), and discusses the main results about them with proofs. In particular, it shows how the main properties of finite-dimensional Hopf algebras may be derived from the theory of tensor categories. Many important results are presented as a sequence of exercises, which makes the book valuable for students and suitable for graduate courses. Many applications, connections to other areas, additional results, and references are discussed at the end of each chapter.